A Multimedia Message Service (MMS) can transmit and receive, like a short message, a more personalized multimedia message, e.g., a text, a graphic, an image, an audio, a video, animation, music and other information contents, without any influence on normal communication of a mobile phone. The MMS is consisted of a series of slices (like a slide show) by which text, audio and video information in various formats is organized for display.
In the MMS, such multimedia information is organized together in the SMIL language and transmitted over a network, and can be sure to be played at a recipient in a style at a sender in the SMIL language.
The MMS makes use of a subset of the Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL) as a description language, and the SMIL is a description standard established by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) based upon the eXtensible Markup Language (XML). The SMIL language can control the layout and play timing of a multimedia object. Each piece of MMS information is consisted of a file in the SMIL description language, and all the slides in the file have the same layout. Each slide includes at least two regions, one of which includes texts and the other of which includes images. Indeed, each slide is a frame including a layout and an index to contents (a text, an image, an audio and a video). The play period of each slide is in seconds, and play times of a text and an image can be set separately in each slide.
The receiver has to parse the MMS information upon reception thereof. The parsing of the MMS refers to a process in which an MMS data packet is parsed for an SMIL document upon reception of the MMS data packet over the network, and attached media (texts, pictures, voice, videos, etc.) are extracted according to a description of the SMIL document and encapsulated into a construct that can be recognized and played at a terminal.
Comparisons of character strings are required when the SMIL document is parsed for setting values of a keyword and a character string type. An existing implementation method is to compare each character string extracted from the SMIL document with keywords specified in the SMIL to find out a corresponding keyword and keyword attribute. This parsing method by comparison is algorithmically simple but involves a large number of comparisons and thus has low efficiency.
In summary, the MMS information is currently parsed in the SMIL, to thereby result in a slow parsing speed, a slow response speed and relatively low parsing efficiency.